S P O T ／ SPOT-268

Aburajima Senbon-Matsu Embankment & Chisui Shrine

油島千本松締切堤・治水神社あぶらじませんぼんまつしめきりつつみ・ちすいじんじゃ

Where the Kiso, Nagara, and Ibi rivers braid together across the flood-prone "wajū" lowlands of southern Gifu, a kilometer-long line of pines marches along a man-made dividing embankment — the Aburajima Senbon-Matsu Embankment, a National Historic Site since 1940. Its serenity hides one of the bleakest episodes in Japan's engineering history. In 1754-55 the Tokugawa shogunate ordered the distant Satsuma domain to tame these rivers in a punitive construction levy known as the Horeki water-control project. The work bled the domain of money and lives: dozens of samurai died of illness or took their own lives, and the project's chief commissioner, Hirata Yukie, is said to have killed himself upon completion to answer for the toll. The pines were planted by Satsuma hands; the embankment they line still separates the channels today. At its head stands Chisui Shrine, founded in 1938, where Hirata and 84 of his samurai are enshrined and honored each April 25 and October 25 as the "Satsuma gishi," the righteous samurai of Satsuma. It is a rare place where a flood-control structure, a national monument, and a war-memorial-like shrine occupy the same kilometer of riverbank — solemn history sitting just south of the flower beds and observation tower of the popular Kiso Sansen Park.